Love's Labors Lost: April 2015

April 22, 2015

How much would it cost to pay a cast minimum wage?

This is an exercise I've done for the Community Dish, waaaaay back when, and now that Actor's Equity has updated the 99-seat plans for LA theaters (aka, theatre for the little guys).

It's not meant to be an argument for or against imposing minimum wage rules. It's more a gauge of how our budgeting would have to change if we want to pay actors a fair wage.

So, when taking into account the $9 per hour minimum wage, how much would it take to hire actors for one of my plays? Say, Encanta.

It goes without saying that a good chunk of the price would depend heavily upon how much each actor needs to rehearse. However, for a rule of thumb, I'm going to use a guideline of 1 hour per minute of running time.

As a play, Encanta can run anywhere from 80 to 100 minutes, so let's aim for the middle at 90 minutes. There need to be 90 total hours of rehearsal. And, if we are adding tech rehearsal, that can easily get to 100 minutes. That's a nice, round number we can use without cutting it too close.

Now, Encanta has 6 named roles and 3 to however many background roles, meaning at least 9 actors. They are:

Penzima
Katrina
Juan
Rico
Maria
Mob Leader
Mob of Haters

The scene breakdowns with estimated running times and characters are below:

Scene 1.1 (10 minutes, 10 hours of rehearsal): Penzima, Juan, Rico
Scene 1.2 (10 minutes, 10 hours of rehearsal): Penzima, Juan, Rico, Katrina, Maria
Scene 2.1 (10 minutes, 10 hours of rehearsal): Penzima, Katrina, Maria
Scene 2.2 (10 minutes, 10 hours of rehearsal): Penzima, Katrina, Juan, Rico, Maria
Scene 2.3 (10 minutes, 10 hours of rehearsal): Penzima, Katrina
Scene 3.1 (5 minutes, 5 hours of rehearsal): Penzima, Maria
Scene 3.2 (10 minutes, 10 hours of rehearsal): Juan, Rico, Mob Leader, Penzima, Mob of Haters
Scene 3.3 (10 minutes, 10 hours of rehearsal): Katrina, Penzima, Juan, Rico, Mob Leader

With those scene breakdowns, the total rehearsal time (roughly) for each part is:

Penzima = 75 hours of rehearsal
Katrina = 50 hours of rehearsal
Juan = 50 hours of rehearsal
Rico = 50 hours of rehearsal
Maria = 45 hours of rehearsal
Mob Leader = 20 hours of rehearsal
Mob of Haters = 10 hours of rehearsal

So, with the $9 per hour minimum wage, this means that each actor should get paid at least the following just for rehearsals alone:

Penzima = $675
Katrina = $450
Juan = $450
Rico = $450
Maria = $405
Mob Leader = $180
Mob of Haters = $90 each (minimum 3, so $270)

For performance days, the same minimum wage applies. For 12 performances of 2 hours each (including setup and strike), this means that each actor gets $216 for being on stage, which brings the minimum pay for each actor to...

Penzima: $891
Katrina: $666 (ha!)
Juan: $666
Rico: $666
Maria: $621
Mob Leader: $396
Mob of Haters: $306 (minimum 3, so $918 total)

This makes a grand total of $4,599, so rounding up to $4,600 (or $5,000 to give wiggle room) on top of all other production costs.

For a small production, that...isn't actually so bad.

Words, Words, Words

. . . a lot of it [fostering rather than smothering students' playwriting] has to do with finding a way to construct a dialogue about ongoing work that empowers the writer. A lot of it has to do with making sure there's a diversity of voices around you. A lot of it has to do with thinking of the writing program as a brain trust for writers, not as some infantilization in which the dramaturg gets the power. And basically trying to find a place where everyone's aesthetic in the room grows larger rather than smaller. There are many ways to do that. It's really not a hard thing to do.
--Paula Vogel, interview with Ann Linden in The Playwright's Muse

Here is what seems to me an elementary truth that must precede any other: namely, that the theater, an independent and autonomous art, must, in order to revive or simply to live, realize what differentiates it from text, pure speech, literature, and all other fixed and written means.
--Antonin Artaud, letter, 9/15/1931

I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all I need for an act of theatre to be engaged.
--Peter Brook, The Empty Space

My work is characterized by one thing above all --- invention. In theatre we imagine the world, we do not record it, we are not documentary makers. I hold all social realism and journalistic theatre in contempt. It is a sordid habit. And the social realists have the impertinence to pretend they are 'telling the truth…'
--Howard Barker, interview

Women and writers of color are still seen as threats because, in essence, when a woman or writer of color is defining a play world, there's another definition of what our society is, and that's very threatening.
--Paula Vogel, interview with Ann Linden in The Playwright's Muse

Through this experience [working on " . . . and last week it was a mountain"] I learned the importance of the life and the dynamics under the words, and began to see the power of working from the silent space within - the emotions, the images, the experience and the feelings - rather than relying on the words.
--Sande Shurin, Transformational Acting: A Step Beyond

How does it happen that . . . the Occidental theater does not see theater under any other aspect than as a theater of dialogue?
--Antonin Artaud, Theater and Its Double

All conventions are imaginable, but they depend on the absence of rigid forms.
--Peter Brook, The Open Door

I never 'say' anything in my work. I invent a world. Let others decide what is being 'said'. Nor do I claim to tell the truth or enlighten people. We are suffocated by writers who want to enlighten us with their truths. For me, the theatre is beautiful because it is a secret, and secrets seduce us, we all want to share secrets. That is also its politics, if it has any politics at all. And modern democracies hate secrets, they want everything transparent. Obviously the critics collaborate in this desire to expose everything to the light of day, they are the police force, after all.
--Howard Barker, interview

I think that form is content . . . I've always been more interested . . . in the formal devices and the structure rather than in the subject matter . . . I really am a follower of Viktor Shklovsky, who said that in some ways the subject matter doesn't even matter. It's whether or not we see the subject matter anew that matters.
--Paula Vogel, interview with Ann Linden in The Playwright's Muse

I am well aware that the language of gestures and postures, dance and music, is less capable of analyzing a character, revealing a man's thoughts, or elucidating states of consciousness clearly and precisely, than is verbal language, but who ever said the theater was created to analyze a character, to resolve conflicts of love and duty, to wrestle with all the problems of a typical and psychological nature that monopolize our contemporary stage?
--Antonin Artaud, Theater and Its Double

The mediocre artist prefers not to take risks, which is why he is conventional.
--Peter Brook, The Open Door

"Transcendence became my life theme. I wanted to be lifted beyond everyday circumstances and everyday reality."
--Sande Shurin, Transformational Acting: A Step Beyond

I actually think of writing for the stage as not writing . . . It's about structuring, about gaps between the language that are really filled in by the collaborators and the process. It's all about indirection rather than a direct statement . . . It's like a three-dimensional chess game in a way. If I say this, will the director go in this direction? If I say this, will the actor respond? And one of the delights of the process is actually not having your intention fulfilled, but finding out at times that other people's interpretation or intention is actually more interesting than you originally thought of.
--Paula Vogel, interview with Ann Linden in The Playwright's Muse

The person who has an idea of what this language is will be able to understand us. We write only for him. --Antonin Artaud, letter, 9/28/1932